Whether we want to admit it or not, it's human nature to constantly pass judgement about anything from a person's appearance to a controversial image that someone posted on Facebook. And it doesn't stop with email marketing.
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Yes, it's no surprise that the way that you write marketing emails can say a lot about you and your business. To further examine this, BuzzStream and Fractl recently surveyed more than 1,200 men and women to find out how factors such as age, gender, and level of education impacted how they perceived emails.

Here are 3 important takeaways from this study that can help you tremendously with your own email marketing efforts in terms of appeal, open rate, and conversions:

1. Older recipients seriously appreciate brevity.
While this should apply to every aspect of your email, perhaps the most important place to keep it brief is your subject line. It's been found that the open rate drops from 24 percent to 17 percent on average if there are more than 35 characters used in the subject line. A brief subject line is even more critical if your audience often relies on their mobile devices to open emails.

The study uncovered that 60 percent of all respondents found concise emails to be most appealing; however, when breaking down the responses by age group, respondents between the ages of 55 and 64 particularly liked for emails to be brief and to the point. The level of education seemed to have no bearing on the effect of how the audience perceived the length of an email.

2. The biggest turn-offs in an email include errors with grammar and spelling and unattractive fonts.
Most would agree that it is unacceptable to send out a marketing email without taking the time to proofread it first. However, as consumers, we are constantly bombarded with emails that including glaring grammatical and spelling errors.

According to the study, approximately 80 percent of all respondents found grammar and spelling errors to be offensive. Even with just one spelling error in an email, 70 percent of respondents from every age demographic were turned off. Surprisingly, respondents with a graduate level of education were more forgiving of such mistakes than those with only a bachelor's degree or no degree. Of the grammatical errors that email marketers frequently make, most of the respondents agreed that excessive use of punctuation was extremely unappealing in an email.

Using unattractive fonts can also negatively impact your conversion rate. This also applies to the size of the font that you use. The findings indicated that approximately 70 percent of respondents preferred for the font size to remain the same throughout the email. Nearly all respondents showed a preference to using only one font color. Surprisingly, the younger respondents preferred more traditional fonts to be used than the older demographic.

3. Younger generations want to sound smarter in an email, and the older demographic prefers to come across as more authentic.
Both male and female respondents agreed that they want to sound intelligent, knowledgable, helpful, educated, and reliable in the emails that they write. Nearly half of the younger demographic surveyed admitted to re-writing emails to sound more intelligent, and the motivating factor for older respondents (45 to 54 age bracket) to re-write an email is to come across as more authentic.
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Taking note of these three important findings can prove to be very instrumental in helping you to build your own successful email marketing strategy. Knowing your audience can allow you to best make adjustments to your emails to increase open rates and drive more conversions.